This application claims the benefit under 35 USC §119(e) of U.S. application 60/218,464 filed Jul. 14, 2000. This application is also a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/130,041, filed on Aug. 6, 1998 now abandoned; U.S. application Ser. No. 09/635,276 filed on Aug. 9, 2000 now abandoned which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 09/216,787 filed Dec. 21, 1998 now U.S. Pat. No. 6,331,286; and U.S. application Ser. No. 09/799,785 filed on Mar. 6, 2001, which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety now U.S. Pat. No. 7,390,668.
The present invention is related to certain chemotherapeutic medicaments and methods for treatment of human or animal tissue using chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy was developed to treat cancer and other disease with the promise of limiting the invasiveness of the therapeutic intervention. Ideally in the practice of chemotherapy, chemical agents that afford selective toxicity to diseased or otherwise undesirable tissue are administered to a patient. Frequently, these agents are administered systemically, with the expectation that the viability of certain tissues, such as the rapidly proliferating tissues of a cancerous tumor, will be selectively inhibited or destroyed. Unfortunately, most chemotherapeutic agents presently available offer limited specificity for such tissue, resulting in a high incidence of disagreeable side-effects, such as immune system suppression, nausea, and hair loss. While tremendous strides have been made in an effort to reduce or mitigate such side-effects, there still continues to be great difficulty in enhancement of specificity of the drug for tissues to be treated.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide new chemotherapeutic medicaments, new medical uses for such medicaments based on improved specificity of such medicaments for the desired target tissue to be treated, and methods for treatment using such medicaments, thereby resulting in improved treatment outcomes, increased efficacy and safety and reduced cost of treatment.